Because You’re Frightened. Magazine. 1980. Virgin.

Rock and roll’s first wave in the nineteen-fifties was about the shockingly fast process of transforming the dangerous, animal energy of post-war, atomic age youth into a marketable cultural expression. A decade later, artists practicing rock and roll began romanticizing and idealizing that energy, as well as ambitiously expanding rock’s musical vocabulary, until the nineteen-seventies, when a new generation of punks, influenced by Iggy and the Stooges, and by Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, began the next logical process of critical analysis of that energy for social meaning and context. This was a time so fecund with prodigious talents that it’s now split into two periods, punk and post-punk, with some artists whose careers occupy both camps. Howard Devoto, co-founder of both Buzzcocks and Magazine, records with fiendish clarity the tensions and resentments that simmer just beneath the surface of our relationships. Gifted with a modern, literary sensibility, it was Devoto who authored the peerless couplet, “I could’ve been Raskolnikov but Mother Nature ripped me off.” Taken from the same LP, Magazine’s third record, The Correct Use of Soap, Because You’re Frightened has for a chorus this startling invite, “Look what fear’s done to my body!” It’s a shocking, intriguing disclosure that, years later, if you’re still listening to the song, may not have fully resolved itself to your satisfaction. What do the corporeal alterations brought on by fear even resemble? And now that the conventions of pop romanticism have calcified like pressed flora, to whom is the chorus even addressed? Homo sapiens has been practicing the reciprocal exchange of fear for millennia now, but it’s the States’ turn to mount the global stage to make that not unfamiliar announcement that the country is once again at war with itself. From Dostoyevsky: “There exists no greater or more painful anxiety for a man who has freed himself from all religious bias, than how he shall soonest find a new object or idea to worship. But man seeks to bow before that only which is recognized by the greater majority, if not by all his fellow-men, as having a right to be worshipped; whose rights are so unquestionable that men agree unanimously to bow down to it. For the chief concern of these miserable creatures is not to find and worship the idol of their own choice, but to discover that which all others will believe in, and consent to bow down to in a mass.” From Magazine: “Maybe it’s right to be nervous now.”